I wonder how much more organizations would value PII if we could legally demand all of the PII of the executive officers for that same price.
The US banking system has some blame here as well, just knowing someone’s bank account details shouldn’t let anyone transfer money out of it. IBAN system is quite good at this, that people just share their account numbers with each other and even some merchants like restaurants accept payment through IBAN.
It's also about the number of applications being made across the campus, so I don't know how much a handful of people can review or improve things. Every department and school has multiple applications written by students or enthusiastic faculty members, or purchased from various vendors.
Seeing an environment like this, one could quickly assume, somehow correctly, they're just hired to be the neck to hang, and not make much changes.